Friday, December 9, 2016

The 'Rebels' of Aleppo Are No Heroes

Members of al Qaeda's branch in Syria. The group has now rebranded in an
attempt to give the impression it's no longer connected to al Qaeda. (photo:
Mike Segar/Reuters)

The
'Rebels' of Aleppo Are No Heroes

By Robert Fisk, The
Independent

09 December 16

We refer to them as ‘rebels’ – as if they were the Maquis fighting
in the French resistance or Partisans freeing Yugoslavia from the Nazis or,
indeed, the insurgents of Warsaw struggling for freedom from the German SS.
Which they clearly are not

I’ve
just spent hours watching footage of the siege. The pictures are familiar:
planes fall like vultures through the sky and buildings are blown apart,
children are brought to hospitals covered in blood, bodies are buried in
shallow graves, hospitals themselves are repeatedly bombed, entire districts of
the city turned to rubble, civilians flee their homes amid burning buildings.
Rescue workers tug at the living and the dead amid the wreckage of the city.
America and Britain demand an end to the destruction but do nothing. And Russia
cynically and cruelly allows the innocent to die. Readers will know exactly
what I am describing.

The
Warsaw Uprising, of course, 1944, not 2016. The scenes are eerily familiar to
all that other blood-soaked footage from Aleppo we’ve been watching more
recently – but, in one critical way, very different. For the fighters of the
Home Army in Poland – ‘rebels’ against German occupation, patriots loyal to the
Polish government in London – appear constantly in the old black-and-white film
of the Warsaw Uprising. Their own military targets are attacked by their enemy.
Civilians are seen queuing for weapons to fight alongside the insurgents.

Not
exactly what you see in the terrifying film from eastern Aleppo this past year,
where not a single ‘rebel’ can be identified – save for carefully posed shots
in their own propaganda productions – and where every target is a hospital or a
civilian home. And anyone who believes the French nonsense about Aleppo
becoming the “worst massacre since World War Two” should study the stunning
films I’ve been watching in the Polish Museum of the Warsaw Uprising.

In the
first week, the Nazis and their allies murdered up to 40,000 civilians. The
Warsaw Rising was to last for only 63 days, but the death toll was up to
200,000 – half the total deaths of the entire Syrian war, even by the dodgy
statistics upon which journalists currently depend. Warsaw in 1944 was total
war indeed – even if we forget later massacres of even greater bloodshed: the
Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1991 and 2003 Iraqi wars, the Afghan wars, the
Algerian war of independence against the French with a minimum of a million
dead, which the French appear to have forgotten. The “worst massacre since
World War Two” indeed!

But
now a reminder of the tragedy of Warsaw. By mid-summer of 1944, Russian troops
had smashed through the German armies in the east on their way to Berlin, and
reached the eastern banks of the Vistula river opposite the very centre of
Warsaw. Nazi troops had already begun to evacuate the city and retreat towards
the Polish-German border. The Polish ‘Home Army’ of General Tadeusz
‘Bor’-Komorowski, with the full knowledge of the Allied-supported Polish
government-in-exile in London, decided that the moment had come to liberate
Warsaw from the Nazis – at 5pm on 1 August, 1944.

It was
a calculated, daring and disastrous decision. Komorowski wanted to strike when
the Germans were retreating – but before the Russians could ‘liberate’ Warsaw
themselves and impose a Communist government on the once independent Polish
nation. Britain and France had declared war on Germany in 1939, after Hitler
attacked Poland – but they were powerless to help. Besides, Churchill and
Stalin had already agreed that Poland would fall under Soviet ‘influence’ in post-war
Europe.

The
Germans meanwhile brought in SS reinforcements and, on Hitler’s specific
orders, razed the entire city of Warsaw to the ground while the Russians
watched from the other side of the Vistula – and did nothing. They were quite
happy to allow the Nazis to crush the 50,000 armed nationalist Poles of the
Home Army – leaving Warsaw to be ‘freed’ by the Russians in January 1945 and a
Communist government imposed on the survivors.

This
is a necessarily truncated and simplified version of those terrible moments of
history. The British and Americans deliberately delayed air drops of arms and
medicine to the Poles in Warsaw and even refused to send the fully trained
Polish Parachute Brigade to help them. RAF crews did volunteer to fly from
Brindisi to Warsaw but were shot at by Russian as well as German artillery. An
escaped British POW, RAF Lieutenant John Ward, actually joined the Home Army,
the ‘Armia Krajowa’ (AK), fighting in the Rising and sending 64 reports of the
battle to The Times in London. Other foreigners, including
Ukrainians, even Azerbaijanis, fought alongside the Poles, as well as Jewish
survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto rising of 1943.

So
back once more to Aleppo. No-one doubts that foreigners are fighting alongside
Jabhat al-Nusra/Al-Qaida and the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham and other groups around
the city. But, oddly, that’s not what we call them. We refer to them as
‘rebels’ – as if they were the Maquis fighting in the French resistance or
Partisans freeing Yugoslavia from the Nazis or, indeed, the insurgents of
Warsaw struggling for freedom from the German SS. Which they clearly are not.
And while we know that the ‘rebels’ of eastern Aleppo have died fighting
bravely, we also know that they have executed their internal enemies, slit the
throats of their prisoners and that – well, since Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaida
(and has since changed its name yet again) – they have flown passenger aircraft
into very tall buildings in New York.

Which
the Polish resistance would not dream of doing. Indeed, in the footage shot by
four named ‘war photographers’ for the Home Army’s commander – their films were
actually shown at a Warsaw cinema during the Rising – you can see captured
German officers and men surrendering to the Poles, handing over their weapons
and then being fed – and set to work building barricades for the defenders of
Warsaw. The film subtitles even comment on the surprise of the German forces
that they were not executed – as Poles were murdered at the hands of the Nazis.

But
back to the terrifying website and Facebook pictures that we still see from
eastern Aleppo. Why do we not see the defending fighters, as we do on the
Warsaw films? Why are we not told their political allegiance, as we most
assuredly are on the Warsaw footage? Why do we not see ‘rebel’ military
hardware – as well as civilian targets – being hit by artillery and air attack
as we do on the Polish newsreels? Or civilians lining up for weapons to help
the ‘rebels’ defend eastern Aleppo – as Polish civilians, prepared to defend
their city, were filmed in Warsaw?

No,
this does not mean that the pictures of wounded and dead children in eastern
Aleppo are fake. Nor does it mean that the Syrian army or the Hizballah or the
Iranians or Iraqi Shiites are playing by the rules of war. In the Syrian
conflict, there are no rules – except those made up on the spur of the moment
for tactical military reasons – and there are no ‘good guys’ in civil wars. The
battle of east Aleppo is vile and brutal. The Syrian military cannot – and does
not – pretend that it has not killed civilians. Although, until recently,
civilian casualties of artillery shells on western Aleppo fired by the ‘rebels’
– so constantly given that blessed anonymity by us in the press – have been
almost totally ignored.

My
colleague Patrick Cockburn has expressed his own deep unease at the coverage of
the Aleppo siege. For months, Western reporters have failed to state the
obvious: that they cannot send their dispatches from ‘rebel’ areas because the
‘rebels’ would slit their throats open – or hand them over to other ‘rebels’
who would. And thus the ‘rebels’ have been tuned out of the story except for
that one amorphous description. And the more anonymous they become, the braver
they appear – fighters whose predecessors fought the Nazis in the Second World
War rather than foreign-paid and armed opponents of the Syrian regime. And, by
the same token, what better way of painting the besiegers of eastern Aleppo as
descendants of the SS?

If we
could call Saddam the ‘Hitler of Baghdad’ and Milosevic the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’
and Nasser the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’ (as Eden actually did call him), then
World War II goes on forever. Take a trip to Warsaw today, however, and you’ll
quickly learn that the Poles are a deeply betrayed people, and perhaps –
constantly divided by three neighbouring powers (Austro-Hungary, Germany and
Russia) as the Kurds are divided by four neighbouring powers (Syria, Iraq, Iran
and Turkey) – they were born to be betrayed. But their struggle shows up the Aleppo
battle in a very different light from that in which we are currently portraying
it.

So if
you want to make parallels between Syria and the Second World War, for heaven’s
sake spot the difference. Civilians are always heroes, in Warsaw or Syria. So
were the fighters of Warsaw. But are the ‘rebels’ of Aleppo heroes?

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs